The Treaty of Sixteen Twenty-One

In late March of sixteen twenty one, two men walked into the Plymouth settlement. One was Samoset, who had learned English from fishermen working the Maine coast. The other was Tisquantum, known as Squanto, who had been captured by English explorers years earlier, sold into slavery in Spain before reaching England, and eventually returned to find that a devastating epidemic had wiped out nearly his entire village.

The Plymouth colonists had built their settlement on land that epidemic had emptied. The Wampanoag sachem Massasoit, whose people had been severely weakened by disease and were under pressure from the rival Narragansett nation, agreed to a treaty with the Plymouth colonists on March twenty second, sixteen twenty one. The terms called for mutual defense: each side would help the other if attacked.

Neither would approach the other armed. Stolen property would be returned. The agreement was honored on both sides for nearly fifty years, which stands as an extraordinary achievement given everything that would come.

The treaty worked partly because both parties needed it. The colonists needed protection and knowledge of how to survive on this land. Massasoit's people needed allies against the Narragansett.

That mutual need kept the peace until Massasoit's death around sixteen sixty one. The pressures that followed, including the growing English settlements and disputes over land, would pull apart the alliance within a generation, ending in the violence of King Philip's War.